How to Celebrate Valentine's Day
A unique gift idea for the subversive women in your life
Thanks to Substack’s for inspiring this piece!
It all started with me looking for a card to go with this keyring with a cute little Le Creuset saucepan attached. The miniature cookware item was a gift for one of my nieces in London. Over the last year my Mum had been teaching her how to create elaborate vegetarian Gujarati dishes. As a result they were bonding and becoming quite close; it made me so happy to hear that they were on the phone or texting almost every day calling each other “best friend.”
So I searched within my collection of random cards and, inside a boxed set of vintage-themed postcards, I found one that was absolutely perfect! With its portrayal of a woman cooking on a stove, the card was the most fitting backdrop for the tiny pastel pan, even if the caption was meant to be sardonic. Reading the phrase straight however, it worked brilliantly for my niece who was having a blast learning how to cook with her grandmother.
Looking at the box the card had come in, I read the the blurb on the back:
Are you becoming your mother? Do you dream about storage space? Do you like to stir things up? Learn a thing or two about domestic bliss from the women in Anne Taintor's saucy, sassy artwork. These postcards are perfect for telling girlfriends, admirers and your mother exactly what you mean.
As I scanned the rest of the cards in the box, I became curious about Ms. Taintor, the woman who had subverted these images of impeccably domesticated housewives and mothers. Luckily Wikipedia could inform me:
Anne Taintor (born August 16, 1953) is an artist whose themes deal with domestic stereotypes, as viewed through the lens of mid-century advertisements typically found in publications such as Ladies Home Journal and Life. Juxtaposing these images with tongue-in-cheek captions, her work serves as a commentary on the stereotypes of women popularized in the 1940s and 1950s.
There was a time — let’s say it was (ahem)… well before 2020 — when I would have looked at these cards and found the images and captions to be witty. Deriding the drudgery of motherhood, housewifery and domesticity seemed to be fair game in the early 2000s. Around that time, and for at least a decade and a half more, I used to proudly proclaim that I was an “unapologetic feminist.”
In fact the second album for my alien alter ego has the subtitle, “An intergalactic feminist spy thriller…”.
But at the beginning of Covid Madness, whilst doing the very thing the establishment and corporate media cautions one not to do — your own flippin’ research — I came to learn of a former KGB agent named Yuri Bezmenov who had defected to the West. I watched several videos of him including one where he talked about how psychological operations had been strategically introduced in the West as long-term methods to demoralize the masses. One of the agendas he spoke of was to weaken the nuclear family. This could be accomplished by brainwashing women into abandoning domestic life for the corporate ladder. In 2020, I had began to question my own assumptions about major cultural shifts.
Was feminism one of these so-called psyops? And if so, what would be its endgame?
Looking at the cards in 2025, I read the text with new eyes. After all, the world had just endured the most expensive and elaborate propaganda campaign ever carried out on all of humanity and it hadn’t worked on me.1
Seriously, after those long years of observing the utter insanity all around us, and not succumbing, I felt as if I’d just completed my PhD in Subversion Studies. So I couldn’t help but find myself engaging in a bit of critical analysis (or maybe even hermeneutic recontextualization?!2) of some of the captions.
Were these “ironic” captions predictably programmed?
There was this one card that got me started off with the, um…. recontextualization, but interestingly not for its supposed feminist “agenda”.3 Instead it instantly made me think of the globalist push for CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies).
“Cash is for amateurs,” it stated on a postcard of a woman in an expensive-looking outfit, holding a giant leather purse and weighed down with copious amounts of heavy gold jewelry.
Hmm, wouldn’t they like us to believe that?
And it just so happened that I was also looking for a display card for another item: a large dollar sign pendant procured for one of my artistic ventures, an upcycling jewelry biz called Bijoulerie.
I continued to leaf through all the postcards in the box and decided that many of them would be fantastic backdrops for my Bijoulerie but only if I changed the captions that seemed to — excessive alliteration alert — mock marriage, motherhood and monetary management.
You see, my thinking was:
What’s wrong with having people who love you — one’s family — all around you, with you also being committed and devoted to them? Isn’t it healthy for humans to want to be surrounded by people who love and care for them?
Why are we in a time right now when men and women hate each other so much, or at least are supposed to? Is this natural — as in, inevitable — or was the division created?
One can’t deny there is a massive problem between the two sexes today. The falling birth rate in Western countries is proof of that. So I guess the original Yuri Bezmenov was right, and the demoralization worked fantastically well.4
Although Substack’s Yuri predicts that consensual arranged marriages will soon be making a comeback, and I can confirm that he is right in at least one instance that I’m personally aware of.5
In any case, I took it upon myself to re-moralize the masses and decided to re-annotate the AnneTaint=ed annotated images by making new captions and using those to display the jewelry I was selling.
Ladies and gentlemen, on Valentine’s Day, all of the above was a long-winded way of saying: please enjoy this video for my jewelry biz, Bijoulerie. It showcases my small, subtle joy in subverting subversion. Blink and you’ll miss it.
PS This delicious luxury granola — Cereal Monogamy — is perfect for today and everyday you celebrate food made with love:
“Made with Love & Fidelity for Sane Francisco by Micropixie…”
Thank you to
for his hermeneutic contributions to this post. And also to dear for her pre-reflections.In lieu of getting duped, I created an online research group called The Navy Blue Venn Diagram and Sane Francisco after that, all the better to find — in real life — other people in the Bay Area it had also failed to work on. There were secretly so many of us and I managed to find many of them.
If you know what this catchy phrase supplied by JDA means, please leave a comment because I have no flippin’ idea! (j/k, I googled it!)
The caption implies the lady in the image does not care about silly things like money, because obviously her husband will buy her anything she desires. Which doesn’t quite fit with the feminist message, right? Because feminism and “girl-power” would say it’s better to be financially independent and not reliant upon a man. So in a way, this image is a great example of toxic femininity given that it implies that women can have it any which way and both.
I, however, refuse to be demoralized! While still a feminist — the old-school kind that believes in simple equality in value of the two sexes, and definitely not a man-hater — I’ve developed a greater appreciation for any woman in any epoch who chooses motherhood and traditional female roles over a career. It was not for me but I value so much the natural instinct.
Three months ago a different niece, the daughter of another of my sisters, got engaged to a lovely young man. The parents (via an extended family network) had introduced them to each other. We are all really happy for the couple.
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Hi! Anne Taintor here in Portland, Maine. My brother forwarded me your article. I LOVE what you've done with the cards! I am working today on another calendar for Chronicle Books, and I'm trying (kind of) hard to steer away from my more cynical images. Not easy. Trying at the moment to decide whether to include "she kind of enjoyed working for an idiot." Yes? No?
Love this post Neshma ❤️✨Love to you